RECRUM: Recovery Ruminations: LaLaLand

Thursday, December 30, 2004

LaLaLand

My wife got a job, which is good -- in LA, which is bad. That's 3 hours from here, if traffic is okay. She's taking the boy with her, which will make me a McDonalds-on-weekends dad, which I do NOT want to be. I have to be a part of his everyday life, to be the father I want to be.

So, if she keeps this job -- it would be the first time in her life -- I will have to move to LA, to be near my son. I have never, ever wanted to live in LA. I have to put some time in and make a good income in my new job for a few months before I move. And give my wife a few months in her job to make sure she will stick with it.

But I have to be near my son. Wherever he is, that is where I have to be.

3 Comments:

At 12/31/2004 04:18:00 AM, Lisa said...: I am on the other end of the single parent spectrum, wishing the dad would spend more than 3 hours a week with the kids. Good for you for focusing on your son.LA would not be my first (or 2nd, or 3rd...)choice to raise a child. I hope this works out. I am sure you can find a way to be in his life every day.And isn't this DAY 5 for you...?
At 12/31/2004 07:21:00 AM, Phil said...: I think, for the time being, I'll be treating each day as Day One.
At 1/16/2005 04:51:00 PM, MrsM said...: Its been sometime since the blogger world has heard from you. Did you end up moving? Hoping everything is going well and keeping you in my prayers.

LaLaLand

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcoholâthat our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

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"...If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through.

1. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness

2. We will not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it

3. We will comprehend the word serenity

4. We will know peace

5. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others

6. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear

7. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain insight into our fellows

8. Self-seeking will slip away

9. Our whole attitude and outlook will change

10. Fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us

11. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us

12. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves

Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us -- sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them..."
© A.A. World Services, Inc.

If God is for us, who can be against us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8